Do you remember the process you went through to learn to read? For many of us, it is something long forgotten, a journey we were led through and generally adapted to with ease. For others, it may have been a struggle. Reading may still be a struggle.
As educators we all play a vital role in developing reading skills in our students, regardless of the age or subject we teach. Yet there isn’t always thorough training in this area.
It’s important to remind ourselves regularly of the process of reading acquisition: of the multiple cognitive processes that are at play when we turn our eyes to the page, because we don’t just ‘read’.
We decode or instantly recognise phonic sound combinations and words. We bring an awareness of print: in which direction to read words, what titles and subtitles tend to indicate; and of grammar and syntax: the significance of sentence construction and word order. We use inference skills to assimilate meaning and we constantly evaluate that reading, adapting our understanding as we read more, continually shaping our comprehension of what another has written down.
Many of us reading this blog do all this with automaticity, barely aware our brain is working on all these planes. But our students, especially our primary-aged students, need to be trained in each sub-skill, practicing with hundreds of texts and thousands of words both audibly and in writing to become ‘good readers’.
It’s a big task, but it is also the most fundamental skill for them: the enabler for their curriculum learning.
If this all sounds a bit overwhelming, it’s because it is.
However, whilst researchers have unlocked the cognitive processes behind reading for us, it isn’t always so easy to put that understanding into our classroom practice. This is complicated even more by the fact that every child’s reading skills will develop at different rates and will constantly evolve: some will decode better than others, some will infer better than others, some will be better at inference now, but acquire better decoding later.
Back in 1986, Gough and Tunmer suggested a Simple View of Reading to support educator understanding of reading. They determined that reading comprehension (which is fluent reading for understanding and meaning) was the product of two key skills:
The Simple View of Reading has been criticised for oversimplifying reading and for its lack of cultural and social considerations, but there’s no denying that it is a helpful tool when beginning to analyse reading assessment data.
Widely conceptualised as a quadrant, the Simple View of Reading suggests that readers need to learn proficiency in both decoding/word recognition and comprehension. If both skills are developed, the child will be a good reader (A).
If both are under-developed, they will struggle with reading (C). These students are often easy to spot both in class and assessments, and we tend to put interventions in place to support them.
Some students might develop well in one skill but not the other, producing two other ‘reader groups’:
Our primary baseline assessment tests students’ word recognition, decoding and comprehension to give you a clear understanding of the balance of these skills. Our Plus reports offer submodule scores for each student so you can identify discrepancies between the three reading subskills, such as in the example below, where Steven has performed better in the word decoding and recognition sections of the test, but has struggled in the comprehension section. Overall, Steven does need support with his reading, but the gap between his comprehension and decoding/recognition scores suggests he would benefit from strategies designed to boost his comprehension first.
It’s one thing to know all this about a child, or a group of children, but what do you do about it? Especially if you’re not the one responsible for the teaching of reading skills or you’ve received limited training in how to support children in this area.
This is why we’ve introduced teaching and learning guidance for our primary baseline assessment – an online tool which offers:
In our guidance, we emphasise the importance of reading aloud as much as you can, not only to support those who struggle with decoding, but because models of fluency and expression are needed at all stages of a child’s educational journey.
We suggest echo reading: you reading words, phrases or whole sentences aloud and students repeating them back to you, or choral reading, where the class reads something aloud together. Both strategies support decoding, word recognition, intonation and fluency.
We also suggest re-reading, something that fluent adult readers do all the time but that we don’t always explicitly teach in the classroom. Re-reading tasks boost reading fluency but also enhance comprehension and retention of key information. A great model is for teachers to read longer passages aloud and then ask students to re-read smaller sections, supporting children’s decoding and word recognition skills. When accompanied by some text-specific questions for the more able, it supports comprehension too.
Simple strategies like this, that don’t require lengthy planning periods, will immediately boost the reading culture in your classroom, enabling more children to feel secure in practicing this vital skill.
We know that data-driven, teacher-led learning in the classroom can really help our children to thrive, but it isn’t always as easy as it sounds. We hope that our easy-to-implement suggestions can help you to save time and continue to make a big impact on the reading journey of the children in your classroom.
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Supportive Strategies that benefit low ability learners specifically |
Core Strategies that benefit all learners |
Stretching Strategies that stretch higher ability learners towards independence |
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Use a variety of reading materials to cater to diverse interests and learning needs and provide some texts in a student's first language. |
Ensure that students are exposed to a broad range of reading genres and topics, including non-fiction. |
Choose texts that are challenging and encourage inference; texts that are too explicit offer fewer opportunities for children to infer. |
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Involve students in varied reading exercises, including choral reading and echo reading, so they can copy and practise a fluent reading style. |
Regularly read aloud to model the pace, intonation and rhythm required for fluent and expressive reading. |
Model reading and thinking processes by reading aloud, demonstrating how to think about the story's events and characters' feelings. Connect new stories to experiences or topics students are already familiar with. |
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Select stories with pictures or that you can pair with other images and read them more than once. When students engage with stories that are accompanied by pictures they tend to understand and remember words more effectively. Create opportunities for role-playing and use of puppets to tell the stories to enable visualisation. |
Re-read familiar texts to encourage children to use and apply the decoding skills they have learned. Ask fact retrieval questions using what/where/when/who question stems. |
Set reading activities like partner reading, re-reading, choral reading and echo reading, followed by comprehension questions. Prompt students to reflect on the texts they read, including the overarching message and how it might link to broader themes and ideas. |
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Ask open-ended questions that prompt students to think about the text and articulate their understanding using why/how question types e.g. “Why do you think the character behaved that way in the story?” Give plenty of thinking time for responses. |
Use speaking and listening, and oracy tasks to support students in making and evaluating their inferences about events, themes and characters. This also provides excellent rehearsal for written work. |
Use reciprocal reading strategies in small groups to support independent discussions about the text. Engaging in dialogue about texts enhances students’ comprehension, critical thinking and communication abilities. |
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The essential building blocks for reading fluency and comprehension are basic decoding skills, including phonemic awareness and word recognition. Use visual clues to help students make educated guesses about the meaning of new words within texts and regularly play vocabulary games. |
Design storytelling and role-play activities that allow children to explore and express characters' feelings and motivations, enhancing empathy and deeper comprehension. Ask questions like, "Why do you think the character felt that way?" or "What would you do if you were in that situation?" |
Encourage students to maintain reading response journals, where they write about their reading. They could include brief summaries of texts, questions or record personal connections. |
If you’d like to find out more about our Cambridge Primary Insight, talk to one of our assessment advisors.